Life Balance

This is neat! With the insane complexity of my life, one of my biggest ongoing problems for years has been management... layers upon layers of categorized to-do lists that have often, themselves, become a meta-project. There comes a point whereon project management becomes a full-time job and nothing whatsoever gets done, except maybe context-switching between activities that never actually receive sufficient attention.

Ned just pointed me to Life Balance, a program that at first sounded New Agey but quickly proved itself to be a powerful tool. It's the first time management system I've seen that effectively incorporates the different "core values" of your life, the times and spaces where you do things, the importance of each task to its parent project... and, significantly, the critical difference between urgency and importance. This is much more useful than the arbitrary "priority" level that typical to-do list managers let you set, and exceeds a PERT chart in overall effectiveness when you consider the big picture instead of a single project. Interacting with the software is quick, too, which is a delight, and its inheritance model keeps you from having to redundantly enter data for a long list of tasks. Based on all you tell it, the program recursively determines what tasks are relevant and most important in the place where you happen to be at the moment... then rewards you for checking them off by dynamically adjusting a pie chart that reflects the overall distribution of your time and energy.

I'm still in my first day of using it, though; here is a much more thoughtful review by Jeff Kirvin.

By the way, Life Balance syncs between a Mac (or PC) and the Palm, so it's probably the "killer app" that will get me back to using a PDA. I've been poring over the palmOne website this evening...